But on a personal level, the reports hit me especially hard — I grew up a fan of the Toronto Blue Jays, the team for whom Halladay first made his name as an ace. I was too young to experience the back-to-back World Series titles of 1992 and 1993, so my earliest memories came of the Blue Jays teams that stunk it up in the first decade of this millennium. Halladay was the one bright spot on an otherwise mediocre Toronto squad, so it was fitting that late Blue Jays game-caller Tom Cheek gave him the nickname “Doc” — a reference, of course, to Doc Holliday. But Halladay truly was a doctor on the mound — he healed so many of his team’s ills whenever he got the nod as that day’s starter.1

Because he spent years on a scuffling Toronto team, Doc’s greatness often gets overlooked. But it shouldn’t be. Based on total pitching wins above replacement since 2000, nobody this millennium has surpassed him yet, even though he hasn’t pitched in four years.

The Doc was the greatest pitcher of this millennium

Pitcher wins above replacement since 2000

RANK

PLAYER

WAR

COMPLETE GAMES

CY YOUNG AWARDS

1

Roy Halladay

61.7

65

2

2

CC Sabathia

61.5

38

1

3

Zack Greinke

60.7

16

1

4

Clayton Kershaw

59.4

25

3

5

Mark Buehrle

58.5

33

0

6

Justin Verlander

56.6

23

1

7

Tim Hudson

54.8

25

0

8

Cole Hamels

54.0

16

0

9

Felix Hernandez

52.4

25

1

10

Johan Santana

51.4

15

2

Sources: The Baseball Gauge, Baseball-Reference.com

After this period of mourning for Halladay, writers and analysts will inevitably turn their attention to his Hall of Fame chances. And according to the yardsticks that we statheads typically look at, Halladay might seem like a borderline case. Because he had fewer dominant years than Hall of Fame voters like to see — he had injury problems early in his career and then retired relatively young — Halladay’s résumé is slightly below the HOF average for starting pitchers.2 And although he meets the Hall’s criteria on other measures such as Bill James’s Black Ink Test (which tracks how often a player leads the league in important statistical categories), he falls short on some of the big statistical benchmarks that typically mark a HOF career.

However, Halladay’s accomplishments are being sold short by these kinds of evaluations. His career stretched across two major eras of pitching, from a time when starters were often asked to finish games (no matter how many pitches it took) to the modern game, where bullpens are taking over for starters earlier and earlier. Halladay helped build a bridge between those two styles of starting pitching — as mentioned above, he could (and often did) go the distance and then some, recording complete-game totals that would have been commonplace in the 1980s and ’90s, but that stood out compared with his peers in the 2000s and even the 2010s, a decade in which he only pitched three full seasons.

Halladay was a bridge between pitching eras

Most complete games by decade in MLB, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s

1990s

2000s

2010s

RK

PITCHER

CG

PITCHER

CG

PITCHER

CG

1

Greg Maddux

75

Roy Halladay

47

Clayton Kershaw

25

2

Randy Johnson

65

Livan Hernandez

36

Adam Wainwright

19

3

Jack McDowell

61

Randy Johnson

32

Felix Hernandez

18

4

Kevin Brown

58

CC Sabathia

28

Roy Halladay

18

5

Roger Clemens

57

Curt Schilling

26

James Shields

18

6

Curt Schilling

57

Mark Mulder

25

Johnny Cueto

17

7

Scott Erickson

47

Mark Buehrle

24

Justin Verlander

17

8

Chuck Finley

46

Javier Vazquez

23

Cliff Lee

16

9

John Smoltz

42

Bartolo Colon

23

David Price

16

10

Doug Drabek

41

Sidney Ponson

23

Ervin Santana

16

Source: FanGraphs

Yet he was also a thoroughly modern pitcher, dominating with strikeouts and pinpoint control, a technician in addition to a workhorse. Since 2000, his fielding-independent pitching (relative to the league) is right up there with today’s aces such as Clayton Kershaw, Chris Sale and Corey Kluber. Since many of the metrics most commonly used to judge Hall of Fame standards were built with pitchers of a different era in mind, the metrics might need to be adjusted to better reflect what’s valued in today’s best hurlers. And Halladay might serve as a great test case, since he (more than maybe anyone else) helped the game transition between those eras of pitching.

Whether Doc makes it to the Hall of Fame is irrelevant right now, though. What matters right now is that every time Halladay took to the mound, people were watching. Regardless of whether you were a pitcher or a hittergrowing up, you wanted to be like Doc.

— Neil Paine contributed research.

CORRECTION (Nov. 8, 2017, 11:30 a.m.): A previous version of the first table in this article incorrectly showed Tim Hudson as having 26 complete games since 2000. He had 25.

Footnotes

As Jayson Stark pointed out, in games that Halladay started between 2002 and 2011 (his prime), his team went 195-108. When someone else started, his teams went 646-670.

Based on JAWS, a WAR-based measure that tries to evaluate a player relative to his peers at the same position by balancing career and peak value.

Daniel is a former sports intern with FiveThirtyEight and is now a data journalist at the Guardian in the UK. He’s an alumnus of the University of Missouri. @daniellevitt32